Posterity will bless our name.
NAPOLEON
E
MPLOYERS have better than average opportunities to indulge their bad temper and spite, but no office manager would think of insulting his window cleaner just for the fun of it — the man could pick up his pail and go to wash windows somewhere else. There is always another job for most people, at least in times of general prosperity, and this puts some limit on the rudeness they can be subjected to. Employees are treated according to the amount of pride they can afford, and by this law of social relationships actors are spared nothing but the rack and the wheel, owing to the fact that ninety percent of them are out of work at the best of times. No doubt the proverbial viciousness of directors and producers derives from their license to be insolent with impunity to a great many luckless individuals who are helplessly dependent on them: this is how they acquire the habits of absolute monarchs, amusing themselves by toying with their subjects' self-respect or, better still, taking it away al-together to savor as a tidbit between meals. Another person's ego is the most exquisite of delicacies, kings' caviar — those who taste it can never resist it.Still, the lot of the working actor is enviable in comparison with what he has to go through when he is looking for a part. During his periods of unemployment Dana Niven started out every morning by performing dozens of cheerfully confident expressions in front of the mirror to brace himself for the day's work of swallowing insults. He rarely knew ahead of time whom he would be able to see, but he could be absolutely cer-tain that if he had the luck to meet anyone with the power to cast him in a film or a play, it would be an experience that would leave him writhing for hours. Despite his many years in the profession he could not reduce his pride to fit his circumstances; yet he sought out the peo-ple who would assure him that he was not young enough or old enough,
that he was too short, too heavy or too lightweight, that they were look-ing for an actor with real presence. Nor was it easy to obtain the signal honor of being humiliated by one of these great men. They would be-stow their insolence only on a favored few, as a sort of vague promise that they might remember the victim on some other occasion.
Just to be noticed by one of these demigods was a rare privilege and Niven would not have had the good fortune to attract the attention of Robert G. Madesko if he hadn't been worrying about Mark at the time.
`What's wrong with a kid having wild ideas?' he reflected as he walked along the Champs-Elysées in the rain, on his way to the Paramount Building, trying to convince himself that his son was all right. `He might end up as a writer — he can imagine anything! He might do a script for me someday. I'd get a part without having to eat shit for it.' This pos-sibility looked particularly attractive after hours of waiting in the Para-mount reception room, hoping to talk to somebody important. `But even if he goes to the Bahamas, what's so terrible about that? He could have a great time diving for treasure and working as a lifeguard. The air's clean there and the sun shines and when it rains it makes a change! I've got a nerve trying to reform him — I'm sure lifeguards in the Bahamas earn more than I do. I shouldn't fret — I'm turning into a cranky old woman.'
Noticing Madesko hurrying through the reception room, he called out:
"If you ever make a drag film, Mr. Madesko, cast me as an old woman!"
Robert G. Madesko was a producer of moneymaking films. In his late forties by this time, he still looked like a college athlete, thanks to his habit of walking fast. At the beginning of his career, he walked fast to convince people that he was busy and successful, and by the time he was busy and successful enough not to need to draw attention to it, he had become keen to remind people that he was still young enough to be quick on his feet. But though he was always in a hurry he took the trou-ble to greet everyone he knew, or rather everyone who knew him, with a nod and a warm smile, which testified to the extraordinary fact that Robert G. Madesko, who no longer needed to notice anybody and could have walked through the world as though it wasn't there, still gave thought to people. As they used to say of Hollywood liberals, he believed in the equal worth of all human beings no matter how insignificant they might be.
From the way Niven tried to catch his eye Madesko remembered him as a face glimpsed once or twice on the screen, and he nodded and smiled as he rushed past; but then Niven's remark stopped him in his tracks.
He turned around and gave the apparently heterosexual actor an apprais-ing look, the look a shopper gives a bargain counter, which Niven could never have obtained from him but for his idiotic request. "So you want to play an old woman . . . I haven't heard that one for at least a week,"
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he said, though he hadn't heard it for months. "Why an old woman?"
"Because I am one. It happens to many men, especially fathers."
"Let me see you in profile."
Niven turned his head.
Madesko pursed his lips to show that he was unimpressed. "I'm sorry, but you don't look like an old woman to me."
"How do I look to you?" the actor couldn't resist asking.
"Let's see — short, dark, heavyset, thin mouth, touch of madness in the eyes — yes, you look more like Napoleon to me. Who said you have nothing going for you?"
"Nobody, I hope."
"Well, people say a lot of things, but they're fools," the producer responded emphatically as if Niven had confirmed the calumny instead of denying it and he, Madesko, felt obliged to cheer him up. "And the worst fools pass through these offices. Hardly anybody in this business knows the first thing about it. You couldn't design tunnels if you had no idea of the problems of weight distribution, the resistance of various metals, the use of compressed air and steel liner plates . . ." and Ma-desko went on listing the rudiments of tunnel making, partly because he was aware that it was surprising how much he knew about the subject, and partly because he enjoyed watching his listener's brooding face, knowing for certain that Niven must be wondering whether there was anything for him at the end of the tunnel. "Or take medicine . . . !"
he exclaimed.
Niven's face darkened.
"No, you're right, medicine is just like the movies," Madesko con-ceded with a sigh. "There's a general decline of competence — and that's how the world is coming to an end. But in the meantime!" Here he paused and gave a slight smile to indicate that he kept ticking over, thinking, working, even while chatting away — and indeed he was thinking that unknown actors cost next to nothing and he ought to pay more attention to them. "In the meantime, I think you might have a future."
"Thanks."
"No, no, I'm serious. I'll tell you what I'll do to prove I'm serious
— I'm going to look foolish for you. I'm willing to undergo the embar-rassing experience of confessing . . ." (he looked calmly at his watch to show that there was no question of his being embarrassed) "that I haven't the faintest idea what your name is, so I have to ask you for it.
I wouldn't do that if I wasn't interested, would I?"
`He doesn't know who I am but he knows that people say I have nothing going for me,' Niven thought, wishing he could afford to hit the bas-tard. But he gave his name and the name and phone number of his agent.
"Ah, the unsuccessful Niven!" exclaimed Madesko, writing in his 43
notebook with the sorrowful expression doctors assume when they are confronted with a dying patient but are not quite ready to give up. "Of course, of course I know you."
Niven managed eventually to forget the experience, or rather it be-came indistinguishable in his mind from other disagreeable encounters.
But fourteen months later, while he was playing in the musical at Her Majesty's in London, he got a call from his agent: Madesko wanted him to test for the leading role in a film about the rise and fall of Napoleon.
The screen tests were successful and Niven was offered the part for a fee of $42,500 — and a percentage of the profits which he knew per-fectly well he would never collect.
"We're not paying you much," Madesko told him at the signing of the contract, "but we're giving you a break that's worth a fortune."
"I'll tell that to my bank manager."
"You'll be able to make the producer of your next picture pay for our stinginess," Madesko remarked with a self-mocking smile which was meant to indicate that he knew full well that he was taking advantage of Niven and had every sympathy for him. "Seriously, I feel terrible about your contract," he added in his serious voice, becoming a changed man as he bent a little to shoulder his sorrow. "I had better things in mind for you — but you know what the money situation is. The distributors are squeezing us dry — middlemen take all the profit these days — and artists are the first to suffer. I only wish we lived in a different world."
The actor replied in the bantering tone men use to speak their minds when they can't really afford to. "It's awfully good of you to feel sorry for the people you exploit."
"He has a big house, a big car and a big heart," quipped the agent.
Niven, playing the part for $42,500, wore costumes which cost
$175,000. The fees of the leading actor and scriptwriter were the only costs on which Madesko economized. He flouted the current fashion for low-budget films and relied on publicity about all the money squandered on the production, so that if everything else failed he could still count on the public's curiosity to see what $8,000,000 (a huge sum in those days) could do. The film was a success, eventually grossing over
$6o,00o,000, but this didn't please Madesko as much as the fact that the profit would have been half a million less if he had employed an established star instead of Niven.
"You've got to trust your instincts," he told his hangers-on. "Who else would have had the guts to risk eight million on an absolute no-body?"
To journalists he spoke of Dana Niven as "a neglected genius who finally came into his own".
There was some truth in this even if Madesko couldn't make up his 44
mind whether he meant it or not. French critics allowed that Niven's was a convincing performance (for an American) and compared it fa-vorably with Marlon Brando's portrayal of Napoleon in an earlier and misconceived film. If Brando had greater magnetism, Niven had more style and intellectual force; and in the scenes of defeat, particularly the burning of Moscow and his farewell to the Imperial Guard at Fontaine-bleau, he became the personification of profound, unstated despair, creating the kind of reverent hush that is not infrequent in the theater but is the rarest thing in movie houses.
"There isn't a thing I don't know about failure," was Niven's own sullen comment on his performance.
At no time did he feel so keenly the injustice of eighteen years of neglect as at the very moment when he proved that he hadn't deserved it. Unlike writers or painters or composers, actors cannot practice their art in isolation, in defiance of other people's poor opinion of their abil-ities, and Niven was maddened by the thought that with such an oppor-tunity earlier in his career he could have spent his best years acting in-stead of worrying about the rent. Now famous if not rich, he was outraged by the general incredulity and amazement over the fact that he had any-thing in him, and his bitterness about all this spoiled much of his plea-sure in his "sudden" rise to prominence.
Mark was inclined to credit no one so much as Napoleon himself for the dramatic change in their fortunes.
"Just think about it!" he exclaimed, walking to and fro with his head bent and his hands clasped behind his back, like his father in the film.
"Listen! If Napoleon hadn't turned Europe upside down, there wouldn't have been a film about him and it wouldn't have helped you at all that you can look like him." It was about this time that Mark was struck by the realization that the past wasn't past at all, and what happened hundreds of years ago could be more important for him than what happened yes-terday. He had already worked out Napoleon's connection with the Flora:
if Napoleon hadn't occupied Spain in 1808, then Spain's grip on her overseas colonies might have remained firm enough to prevent or at least postpone the revolutions in South America — in which case San Martin would not have invaded Peru, there would have been no reason to load the Flora with the treasures of Lima, and he, Mark Niven, would not have been looking for them. He was delighted now to realize that his father's career had been influenced by the same emperor as his own. "I bet not even Napoleon could have imagined that one of the conse-quences of his campaigns was going to be that an actor from Rochester, New York, would make the big time in the movies!"
"I haven't got another job yet," Niven warned him dryly.
"But doesn't it leave you absolutely dumbfounded," Mark persisted, 45
"doesn't it absolutely floor you, the way dead people, people who lived maybe hundreds of years ago, who could never have dreamed of our existence, are mixed up in our lives?"
"To coin a phrase, I know all that."
"Do you?" Mark asked soberly, taken aback. "It was news to me."
"Well, I suppose you're right, it's amazing when you think about it.
Good old Napoleon . . . ! Still, you might eat your words and give me some credit too."
"Come off it, Dad, you know you're great," Mark protested. "Do you want me to flatter you?"
Niven burst out laughing. "Yes, why not! Do you realize that you may yet see your father paired with the greatest actor of the age? Olivier might produce my translation of Robert Guiskard at the Old Vic — if he can find the right one-acter to go with it — and he and I would play the leads!"
There seems to be such a thing as family luck. It was in the spring of the father's success that the son finally found what he was looking for:
three lines in the logbook of an Italian merchant ship, the Sant'Andrea of Genoa, whose captain noted that she passed the Flora just after eight on the morning of September 27, 182o, some twenty minutes before the hurricane struck them. According to the captain's indications the En- glish brig was making for the northeast coast of Santa Catalina, one of the small Out Islands of the Bahamas — the same coast where, only twelve days later, a Spanish frigate passed pieces of wreckage scattered on the reefs. (Sightings of unidentified wreckage were the sort of infor-mation, meaningless in itself, that Mark had diligently collected through the years in the hope that it might turn out to be useful.)
But the Sant'Andrea logbook was really the find of the librarian at the maritime archives in Genoa. This middle-aged lady, Signorina Angela Rognoni, had spent many hours collecting papers for Mark to scan, working for him even during the long intervals between his visits. While his father was attending the world premiere of The Emperor in Cannes Mark had another chance to go to Genoa, and the Sant'Andrea logbook was among the documents she had put aside for him.
Reading those three decisive lines was a moment for which Mark would gladly have given his right arm if he hadn't needed it for diving. His first impulse was to go and hug Signorina Rognoni for her help, but he managed to suppress it. This news was too big to be shared with strangers.
What if she gossiped about his discovery? Taking a quick look around, he reached for his razor blade, cut out the page and buried it in his pocket.
Meno male!
Carrying the documents back to Signorina Rognoni's desk, he con-vinced himself that the person he should be grateful to was the captain of the Sant'Andrea, who was so good at keeping records. This notion 46
allowed him to face the signorina's questioning glance with a clear con-science. Though her hair was gray she had bright eyes and a childlike, expectant face, as if her whole life were still ahead of her, and she felt a sympathy for the young man which made her blush. When she asked him whether her work had been of any use, he had the strength of will and the meanness to deny it.
Signorina Rognoni was distressed and apologetic, as if she had failed him; but Mark maintained his dejected expression while all the time, crazed with joy, he was jumping up and down inside his head.
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